The Timeless Magic of <em>The Snowy Day</em>

Keats’s vibrant collage illustrations bring this simple plot to life. They include checkered oilcloth used for lining cabinets to make the mother’s dress, marbleized paper, gum erasers for snowflakes, watercolor for bubbles, splatter painting with India ink, and more. Keats cut pieces of beautiful paper from all around the world—Sweden, Japan, Italy—and glued them together to make images worth looking at over and over again. Reynold Ruffins, one of Keats’s artistic contemporaries and a fellow picture-book artist, wrote in an anthology of Keats’s work that Keats would spend days pondering different hand-dipped papers, trying to choose the right one for an image he was composing.

Keats departs from realism in his portrayal of the snow in The Snowy Day, but this departure paradoxically makes the story ring more true. The illustration in which Peter and his buddy walk into the “deep, deep snow” might feel like an exaggeration because of the height of the mounds on either side of them, but when you’re as small as Peter is, perhaps the mountains of snow feel as big as they look on that last page of the story. Keats effectively illustrates a child’s-eye view.

The Snowy Day is famous for being the first book featuring an African-American child to win the Caldecott Medal for excellence in children’s picture books. African-American children had certainly appeared in picture books prior, but the high profile nature of the Caldecott Medal means that the book still has wide distribution, outlasting many of its contemporaries. To this day, nearly every American library that houses children’s books buys at least one copy of The Snowy Day, making it widely available to young American readers everywhere.This book not only cleared a path for Keats to illustrate in many more books the children of color with whom he grew up in Brooklyn, but through Peter, it gave those children a window into their own lives: a kid who looked like them, who loved to play in the snow, too.

If I like the work of an author or illustrator, and I discover that the artist is also a likable person, I appreciate their work more. Maybe the children who have made The Snowy Day the most checked-out book of the New York Public Library system would like to know that Keats cherished the feedback he received from his readers and wrote back to them. According to Anita Silvey in her introduction to the Keats anthology, he often quoted his favorite letter from a kid who wrote, “We like you because you have the mind of a child.” Susan Hirschman, Keats’s longtime editor, said that he agonized over the mistakes he made in his early picture books. When a child pointed out that a guinea pig’s tail in Millicent Selsam’s How Animals Sleep (1968), which Keats illustrated, was actually the tail of a rat (naked rather than hairy, as it should be), he wrote letters of apology to both the mother and the child. Knowing this gives me an even greater appreciation for the craft and care with which Keats created The Snowy Day.